To search for an individual sign, just type its name in the search box in capital letters, like: GAR.
To search for a group of signs appearing in the same case — separate all the signs with a space, for example: NAM2 DI. Since the original accounts are not written in a linear fashion, the order in which you enter the signs does not matter. 4ky will find all cases in which all the signs that you entered appear.
To search for signs appearing in the same account, separate them with commas — like SAL, KUR. This query will simply find all the accounts where both signs appear. Again, the order of appearance does not matter.
By default, the search engine ignores sign variants. If you tick the “distinguish variants” box on the search page and type specific sign variants (like DUG~c) into the search box, you will be able to find only those forms, instead of all the variants of the sign.
The engine treats compounds like SAL.KUR as single signs. To change that, tick the "split compounds" box, and the search engine will treat the compounds' constituent signs as separate entities, and the results for SAL will also include its compound forms — like SAL.KUR or ZATU737xSAL.
In most cases, the transcription conventions used by CDLI were followed, including the following:
Regular numbers are used instead of subscripts, so LU2 for LÚ, and sign variants are written after the ~ sign, so SZE~a represents the a variant of the ŠE sign. The marks of sign adjacency were left unchanged.
4ky is available on GitHub.
The author of 4ky (2023-2024) is Piotr Zadworny, a PhD candidate at Freie Universität Berlin.